


My Own Armageddon

by Croik



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Gender headcanons, Outlast 2, Post-Game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-10
Updated: 2017-05-10
Packaged: 2018-10-30 11:36:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10875963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Croik/pseuds/Croik
Summary: Val survives, but her fate is not what she was promised.





	My Own Armageddon

By the time Val dragged herself from the mines, the war was already over.

There was nothing left of Temple Gate. The village lay scorched black and dead, only splinters left of what had once been a chapel, a school, a community. The air was thick with ash and every breath of it was agony. Val swayed dizzily with each attempt to laugh as she burned her naked feet on the still smoldering earth. But still she laughed. The gates of Hell had opened and left not one wretched ignorant behind. She imagined every rusty stain among the ruins belong to Knoth himself, and she laughed.

But then something stirred, and Val realized she wasn't alone after all. Someone was moving about the wreckage. No, not someone—not anything human. It was an angel, cloaked in white with a face dark and indescribable. Its breath hissed and moaned as it took notice of her, and its voice, popping like oil in a pan, boomed against her tender eardrums in an indecipherable roar. It filled Val with a horror like rapture, and as she spotted several more angels turning her way, the realization flooded through her.

The war was _lost_. Their apocalypse had been _halted_ by God's pure white messengers after all. Maybe Knoth had sacrificed himself to call them down, she thought. Maybe he had ascended and was among those already reaching for her.

Where was the child? "Where is the child?" she cried, and when a hand closed around her arm, she broke it, startled by how easily the angel's bones snapped between her fingers. "What have you done!?" But there were so many, and her strength so far spent, that they soon overpowered her and drove her to the ground.

***

Val awoke to her skin being ripped from her. She tried to cry out but couldn't through the blood in her throat. She cowered against a cold, slick floor, grimacing beneath a light so bright and blinding it could have only been the eyes of God. Great jets of needle-like water tore through her and left globs of her flesh in the pool between her knees. When her sight managed to adjust to the Heavenly onslaught, she saw a pair of white-clad angels watching her with their bottle-glass eyes. The water seemed to come straight from them and she wondered if it was actually their semen. It stripped her of her self.

"Huh, look at that. It's a man after all."

"Fuck, that's a shame."

Val bared her teeth at them, eager to know what an angel's blood tasted like. Before she could move, the stream tore another chunk out of her skin, and blood flowed hot and blistering down her ribs. The strength flowed straight out of her.

"Oh shit—I didn't see that under all the mud."

"I'll call medical!"

The angels stopped their ejaculating, and one of them crouched down next to Val, putting its hand to her chest. Only then did she remember Mortimer shoving his knife through her ribs back in the mines. The pressure made her gag and she tried to claw the hand off her.

"Calm down, Buddy. We'll get you stitched up."

Val reached into the brilliant white, aiming for the dark smear of the angel's face. She felt its throat beneath her fingers and squeezed with all her might, but her might was lacking, and she couldn't kill it. She thought unwittingly of her children.

***

Val's torment was everything she had expected and hoped for. An end befitting a failed disciple.

They bound her to slabs, stabbed her with needles. They stripped her of all senses but pain, leaving her to simmer, helpless, beneath blades made of lightning. They pierced her skin over and over. They ripped the hair from her scalp and replaced it with plastic and wire. They shoved things between her teeth. They prodded at her sex. She was toyed with and manipulated like a lamb bound for slaughter, and she fantasized vividly of angels tearing into her flesh and devouring her bit by bit. Angels, too, were creatures driven by hunger, it seemed. Best that they savor the last human left alive.

They sealed Val in a great cylinder that hummed as if it were alive. As she lay, bound and gagged in her confinement, she rejoiced—yes, this was the chaos she had desired. This was the torture she'd earned. God's army may have defeated the child in its womb, saved themselves from its annihilation, but only she remained of her race, and her life was now one of ceaseless punishment. She had forced angels to bow to their vengeful desires and made demons of them. In that way, she had succeeded. Though she would have preferred to watch Knoth suffer alongside, she could be content, knowing that the world had reformed according to her God's fearsome promise: Armageddon had come to her alone, and she alone could revel in it.

When they pulled her from the tube, she was laughing, tears on her face.

***

When Val awoke next, she was warm, and calm, and free from pain. She assumed God was toying with her.

Everything was still white. The walls, the lights, the sheets. There was a mattress under her back and her wounds had been bandaged. Everything was…clean. Startlingly clean—unnaturally clean. For the first time in maybe her entire life she experience a profound and dizzying silence, with no flies buzzing, no whispers in the dark, no distant grunting or crying of women. Everything was pristine and holy and if there had been anything in her stomach she would have vomited.

The angels were at the foot of her bed.

"The stab wound was fresh. They think it must have happened right before the blast, or else during. He covered it with mud to stop the bleeding. The antibiotics should clear up the infection."

"Tough son of a bitch. What about his junk?"

"Much older. Weeks, maybe months."

Val stared into the room around her. The walls, while white, were also blank. A toilet sat in one corner, a red light gleamed from the ceiling. Yes, this was a worthy torment. Best to let her experience it in many flavors, before she tired of one.

"Not the first time we've seen that. Does twice make a pattern?"

"Hillbilly Gluskin, maybe?"

The angels laughed, and Val tried to sit up to better see them, but she couldn't get her arms beneath her. Her wrists were strapped to the bedrails.

"Hey, look who's up."

One of the angels came closer, and this time Val could see its face. It looked deceptively human—a man, with thick, brown hair and bushy eyebrows. It smiled at her and her skin crawled. "Can you hear me?" it asked.

"Who killed the child?" asked Val, her throat stinging with the effort. "Was it one of Knoth's? Or one of yours?"

The angel frowned at her. "That's a toughie," it said. "We can talk about it later. First, why don't you tell me your name?"

Val burned with confusion and distrust. "You don't know my name?"

"Uh, sorry, no." The angel gestured to itself. "My name's…Ted. Ted Bundy." It cast a quick smirk toward its companion. "Now, what's yours?"

No, that wasn't right. That was no angel's name. Val looked harder and began to see the man for what he was, with his poor complexion, his uneven features. Ted wasn't perfect enough for divinity and not grotesque enough for its opposite. Ted was human.

Was Ted one of Knoth's? Suddenly Val couldn't be sure, and her heart began to pound. "Val," she said.

The second angel checked something in its—his—hand. "That's on the list."

Ted continued to smile at Val. He had too many teeth and she wanted to pry each from his skull. "You wanna tell me what happened to you, Val?"

Val wanted to ask again about the child, but when she tried, her mind went blank. His question crackled between her ears and suddenly all she could think about was a bloody school room, children's voices etched into every desk and wall. She could feel their blood soaking into her dress.

"It's okay," said Ted, leaning down to touch her shoulder. "Just take a deep breath and try to remember." He chuckled, and his breath was foul. "What happened to your dick, man?"

Val remembered the knife, remembered the smell of flesh burning beneath the iron. The punishment of men, just as this was the punishment of men. If he was only human, as she was, what pleasure was there for her to take from his abominable ministry? What right did he have to punish anyone let alone her?

She lurched from the mattress with all her strength, and "Ted" was close enough that she had little trouble reaching him. She sank her teeth into his throat. She wanted him to feel the strength rushing out of the hole in him, like she had. His gurgling scream was sweet music, the snap of blood vessels between her teeth even sweeter. By the time his companion dragged them apart, Val knew she'd already killed him. "What happened to your neck, Ted?" she sneered as he was carried from the room.

Then the door closed. Val relaxed into the bed and let Ted's blood trickle down her throat. Human after all, that unforgivable prick. But as Val waited for righteous euphoria to settle in, all that came to her was silence. The blood in her mouth turned sour and she couldn't explain it. It was just so quiet. It was a quiet so deep she could hear her heart in her chest, each pump shaking her, like a wave of tiny hands rocking her back and forth. Back and forth.

***

They wrapped her up again. They wrenched her arms back and covered her face until she could barely breathe. They poked and prodded and put her back in the humming tube. Sometimes, one of them would ask her questions. They refused to answer any of hers, so she did the same. Slowly she came to the understanding that they had been watching her all along, these false prophets with their mad medicine. They knew things outsiders ought not know. They asked her about Anna Lee. They asked about the orphans of the scalled.

Then they put her back in the room, but with the lights off, leaving not only silence but pure black. In the mines, even in the thickest darkness she had never felt lost. There was always a rustle of air or a distant drip of water to guide one anywhere they wanted to go. The room was somehow darker than that, a pure void deprived of even the rumble of shifting rocks. Whether her eyes were open or closed everything was the same and she couldn't tell the difference between waking and sleeping.

Eventually, Val was visited by a woman. She was smarter than the men, keeping her distance from the bed. She asked about Mother and Father.

"I don't know what happened to them," Val confessed, mourning them, for they were magnificent, and they deserved her respect. "Tell me, if you know."

"They didn't survive," the woman replied. "Do you know of anyone else who came to the town from the outside? Or anyone who left?"

"No," said Val. "No one came, no one left."

"That makes you the only survivor."

She sounded as if she expected a reaction. "Those that loved me prayed for oblivion," said Val. "And those that loved Knoth deserved it. Alone is a fitting end." She watched the woman's eyebrows rise, and a dreadful curiosity burned inside her. "What God do you pray to?" she asked.

The woman took barely a moment to answer. "I don't," she said. "There's no such thing as God." And she left.

What did she know anyway? She hadn't seen the light come down from the mountain, in all its orgasmic thunder, sharing visions of the war. She hadn't drowned beneath the weight of sin or the vibrancy of pleasure. Maybe she thought Val only meant Knoth's God from the Good Book, benevolent and terrible savior—no, He did not exist, certainly. But _something_ had in its depravity shown Val the bloody confinement of fate. If there was no God, or whatever ancient name it preferred, then who had commanded she kill her children?

In the darkness, she could think of nothing else. The memory of their blood in her skirt had been close to her, always, to fuel and embolden her. She used to lay awake at night and shake as that day replayed again and again behind her eyes. The voice of God made everything as clear and sharp as if their throats were beneath her blade. But deprived of that light, she couldn't recall their faces as precisely as she was accustomed. Everything was blurred, their voice scrambling together. Instead of a thrill of ecstasy she suffered only icy shivers, her stomach in knots. Horror settled against her ribs until she couldn't breathe, and she didn't know why.

This wasn't the fate she'd been promised.

***

"Can you hear me?"

The room was black again, but Val peered into it anyway. "Who's there?"

"My name is Simon," said a man's voice.

"Simon," Val repeated, and her pulse filled the empty space between them. "Are you human?"

"Something like that. I'm here to help you."

His hand touched her arm, but it was covered in a thick glove, and Val could feel something slither beneath the leather. She fell very still, and said, "Let me out."

"Promise you won't try to bite my throat out," Simon replied. "I wouldn't want to have to hurt you."

Val's lips pulled back from her teeth. "I promise."

He undid the strap on her wrist, and immediately she reached for him. He was of average height and she had no trouble jabbing her fingers beneath the hem of his trousers, thinking that with one hand free, she could easily incapacitate him. She got nowhere near his genitals. The skin beneath her hand wasn't skin—she felt hot, squishy rot stretched over a crumbling pelvis. She knew a corpse when she felt one.

"Simon," Val said again, goosebumps on her neck. Simon Magus, come down off his cross, to rescue her from men she'd mistaken for angels. It was almost enough to make her laugh. "The Samaritan?"

"Sure." Simon reached across her body to undo the other strap; she could smell death on him. "Your legs will be weak," he said. "I can't carry you, so you'll have to make do."

Val sat up, and though her head momentarily swam, her body was electric with the promise of escape. "I can run."

Simon freed her from the rest of the restraints and even gave her clothing to wear instead of sweaty sheets. The shoes were soft and gummy and she doubted they would support her. She forgot those concerns as soon as Simon opened the door. Light spilled in with such malicious exuberance that she thought for a moment that she had been tricked twice over, and God's voice and its visions would soon drown her senses. But then her sight adjusted and there was only a long corridor lined with doors.

Maybe each door held another of her, or was meant to. She thought of stalls in a barn and tasted fury.

"Stay close to me," said Simon, and Val saw him for the first time. At least, what she _could_ see of him. He was dressed head to toe in thick garments, a hood pulled so low over his face only the ragged jut of his jaw was visible. His skin, if it could be called that, was scarred and flaking. He moved with the uneven stiffness of a cadaver and Val didn't know what to make of anything anymore.

"What are you?" she asked.

"What are _you_?" Simon retorted. "Stay close to me, and it won't hurt you."

Simon moved into the hall, so Val followed. Despite his insistence that she would have to fend for herself, he matched his pace to what she was capable of. It vexed her to find her legs so uncertain when they had once been so firm. She tried to peek at the other doors as they passed, but each was closed tight with no way to see in. Once, she thought she heard moaning within one of the rooms, but Simon did not break stride and she could not risk falling behind.

Their path split in two at the end of the hall. Val heard a woman scream somewhere to the right, her voice echoing between the narrow walls, but Simon took them left. Val looked over her shoulder, just for a glimpse, and her breath hitched: the walls were red. There was no woman left, only blood and viscera.

Soon, there were more screams. There was more blood and viscera. They passed a dozen meaty stains in their escape from the too-white barn, former humans reduced to pulp along their path. A bit of brain squished beneath Val's shoe and it spread a shudder through her. Maybe she had been too hasty when she'd assumed the war was a farce after all. The voices sounded younger and younger. The ceilings grew tall. There were fingers twisting in her pant legs, but instead of letting them weigh her down, she ran faster, panting with the effort. It wasn't so long ago that she had prayed for and preyed upon slaughter such as this, but suddenly her fingers were numb and her heart racing. There was no booming light to fill her with arousal for the hunt, only the suffocating weight of mortality. If there was no God, what had she done to her children?

They had nearly reached the exit when they came across the source of her captors' grisly demise: a shadow in the rough shape of a man, indistinct and yet inscribed forever on the inside of her skull. It had no eyes but it looked at her, and she felt buzzing inside her a mighty and heart-wrenching captivation for the thing. Maybe her God walked the earth after all.

"Simon," she whispered as he dragged her through doorways made entirely of glass. "Is that—"

"Whatever you think it is, it's not," Simon cut her off. "Just be glad it's on our side."

***

Val had very little understanding of what had happened. Simon pulled her into a truck, only the second she had seen in her lifetime, and drove them out of the compound that had been holding her prisoner. By the time they were putting the building behind them, flames were glowing in the first floor windows. Val lowered the window so she could smell the smoke.

They drove out of an old, dying wood into a dusty wasteland. The air was cold but Val welcomed it against her skin. She missed the moisture of the forest and the caves, but it felt like ages since she had seen starlight, and she welcomed all the tiny pleasures her freedom afforded her. If only she had an eager body to rut against, she might have felt like herself again. She considered Simon, if only to share with him her gratitude at his heroism, but when she touched his thigh he pushed her hand away.

"You'd regret it later," he said, and Val wanted to laugh. He didn't know the meaning of regret.

Eventually, they began to pass other trucks. They passed road signs and billboards, and finally, rusty houses. Val watched them all blur past as sunlight crept above the horizon. "You're taking me to the outside," she said, and suddenly her mind was crammed full of idle curiosities she had not indulged since she was a child.

"You'll be safe for a while," Simon replied. "I know this is going to be hard for you to understand, but those people? The ones torturing you? They go by the name Murkoff. Have you heard that name before?"

"Murkoff," Val repeated, and she remembered herself as a young boy, creeping into the storage room at night looking for tobacco. "I think so. I don't remember where." She watched him carefully. "You're sure they were people?"

Simon grunted. "They may be pure evil, but yeah, they're human. If that's what you mean."

Evil. Val wondered what his definition was. "Are _you_ human?"

"Used to be. Just like that shadow thing that helped us escape used to be." Simon looked at her, and though she still couldn't see any details of his face, she heard him sigh. "You probably won't believe this now. But whatever you went through in that village, or the mines or whatever…that wasn't real. That was Murkoff messing with your mind."

Val narrowed her eyes at him. "They are all dead," she replied. "Father, and Mother. Mortimer put his knife in me—I'll show you the scar."

Simon sighed again, shifting in his seat in apparent frustration. "I mean, yes, it happened. But not how you think it did—not _why_. Murkoff's machine was playing tricks on you."

"I watched blood rain from the sky," Val insisted. "I tasted the seed of the Devil—"

"I saw the tapes," Simon interrupted, but Val didn't know what he meant until he continued. "I read the report. I know what happened to the orphans."

Val shut her mouth and could have sworn she tasted blood under her tongue. She prayed he had eyes under that hood of his for her to gouge. "Who told you to do that?" Simon continued to pester. "Who gave you the order to kill them?"

"Knoth did." Val wound her fingers in the fabric of her stolen shirt to keep them away from him. "He said God commanded it. But—"

"There's no God," Simon interrupted again, his voice harsh. She started to clarify but he talked over her. "No Devil, either. The light—the flashing. The visions it put in you, if you had visions—all of that was Murkoff. It was men, Val. The men that have been poking at you all week are the ones that had you kill those kids."

Sweat wormed across Val's scalp and down her neck. "Men can't do those things."

"These men can."

"You're absurd." Val laughed, a thin, manic sound even to her own ears. "The walking corpse of a sorcerer tells me my God is a puppet of men?"

"I knew you wouldn't make sense of it," Simon muttered, but then he seemed to collect himself, and he sat up straighter. "But that doesn't matter, as long as you hate them as much as I do."

Val turned away. What was there to hate? She had laid her body open in lust for the rapture, and these Murkoff, whoever they may be, had granted it to her. But as she watched each point of light in the night wash away, doubt squirmed in her belly. She couldn't work Simon's words out from under her skin. All her hate she'd traded in for love a long time ago, but the seed of his anger had not fallen on barren soil.

***

They reached a town. It wasn't any larger than Temple Gate as Val remembered it, but it was fierce and stinging, and her nose burned with smells she had never experienced.

Simon parked the truck outside of a long, squat building with many doors. A man sat on the stoop waiting for them. He wasn't like any many Val had ever seen, with very dark hair and almond-shaped eyes. He stood, wiping his hands anxiously against his trousers as Simon disembarked.

"Stay in the truck," said Simon, and he closed his door.

"You said you were just going to take a look," said the new man irritably. "You've been gone all…." He spotted Val in the truck and his face went white. "You brought one back?"

"One of the victims," said Simon. "Her name is Val."

"I don't care what her name is, you can't—" The stranger rubbed his face. Val couldn't say she was displeased with his fear of her. "We talked about this," he said with great efforts at composure. " _Everything_ that comes from Murkoff is dangerous. We can't take them down and play Good Samaritan at the same time."

"I didn't have a choice, Waylon. They were planning to cut her open tomorrow."

Val leaned out the open window, curious to hear more. "I don't care!" Waylon insisted, his hands now in the air, gesturing. "I mean, I sympathize, I truly do. You know I do. But why in God's name did you bring her _here_? I have _children_ , Simon!"

Val's ears burned. She looked past the arguing men and saw, in the nearest window of the building behind them, a pair of young faces peering out. Two small boys with hair as dark as their father's. Watching her.

Val's body acted; without help of conscious thought she twisted the door of the truck open and climbed out. Simon was between her and the door, but when he reached for her she shoved him away. Nothing could deter her. She threw the door open and watched the two boys scatter to the far side of the room. The sight of them cowering together in the corner, alarmed but not yet terrified, tugged bile into Val's throat.

She hadn't seen children since that day. They looked almost alien to her—their eyes were so wide, their hands so small. Without knowing what she intended, she stepped closer, only to realize they weren't alone in the room.

A woman stepped in front of them. She was sturdy and hard, fingers wide and knobbed from work as they curled around the grip of a gun. Val stopped, rooted in place not by the barrel aimed at her head, but the piercing eyes of the woman. _There_ was a hate Simon would likely be proud of.

"Take one more step toward my kids," the woman threatened, her finger on the trigger, "and I'll kill you."

Simon and Waylon entered behind Val, but she gave them no notice. All her focus, all her world sharpened onto the woman standing before her children like a palisade. Her hair was long and full, her breasts heavy and round, her fury absolute. She may or may not have been able to fend off Val at her most determined, but that didn't matter. She was every inch of her a mother ready to die for her children, a frightful and righteous figure that would have never bowed to Temple Gate's unholy ministers. She needed no God and she was magnificent.

"Yes," said Val, smiling, humbled, ripe with shame. "Oh yes, you are…just as a mother should be."

Val fell to her knees and wept.


End file.
